Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
In the last few years, the software services industry has seen a shift in product delivery from desktop applications to complex online applications accessed through a web browser. This capability is enabled through advancements in networking capacity, improvements in web browser technology as well as the availability of remotely accessible, commodity, aggregated computer hardware resources known as ‘cloud computing’. From a technological perspective, these aggregated resources present virtually as a single massive computing entity. This capability has enabled single applications to scale to huge numbers of concurrent users—many millions being common.
There remains the issue, however that users interact directly with applications hosted directly on the virtualised hardware. Application experience varies wildly: each may require separate logins, while data incompatibility and application vendor lock-in are commonplace. From a cloud perspective these issues arise partly because, from a virtual perspective, the applications run directly on the hardware—there is no user operating system layer to deliver a consistent experience across the applications. Consequently, a cloud operating system is desired which can deliver a coherent user experience, and significantly increased application compatibility in the web application domain.
Also recently, there has been a growing focus in capabilities that may be afforded by ‘crowdsourcing’—leveraging the capabilities of the mass of connected individuals afforded by the web to achieve large outcomes in a short time. The problem of application silos previously described represents a barrier to realising the greater potential of these mechanisms. The free interaction of users and applications that could be afforded by the common substrate of an operating system is not present. Consequently, the delivery of a cloud operating system upon which users are able to self-organise into groups arbitrarily, build and deploy applications, as well as being able to actively maintain and evolve the system via these structures would represent a significant opportunity for advancement of the power of the world wide web. An operating system offers a means of organising its users, and a cloud operating system would have the unique opportunity to utilise the scale of its potential user base for the significantly more complex scenarios being exposed through crowdsourcing.
There has also been a recent focus on social reward and reputation structures within applications to incentivise behaviour and establish trust networks. The potential for such structures, once the artificial boundaries of application and user silos are removed, and once complex collaboration capabilities are delivered is tremendous. In combination, these structures may represent a truly significant advance in the organisational utility of the web.